Telephone-based customer service plays an increasingly important role for organizations involved in activities requiring direct communication with customers. In order to serve a maximum number of callers, call centers are typically designed to optimize call handling efficiency and telephone attendant productivity.
An Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is commonly utilized by call centers to enhance attendant productivity. An ACD allows a call center to cost-effectively handle a large number of calls by placing some of the calls in a holding queue when no attendants are available to take the telephone call. When a call is placed in the holding queue, a greeting message identifying the called party is typically played to the caller, indicating that the next available attendant will service the call.
Call queuing plays an important role in call center operations and provides many advantages to the call center, including increased attendant productivity, by minimizing idle time for the attendant, simultaneous handling of a greater number of calls during an increase in calls, and encouragement of callers to wait for an available attendant, as opposed to requiring the caller to attempt another call in response to a busy signal.
In spite of the benefits to the call center, call queuing, however, is perceived by the customers as a waste of their time, and may result in frustration, abandoned calls, a loss of business, and poor customer satisfaction when the customer deems the holding time to be excessive. Thus, in order to distract the callers such that their focus is not on the amount of time they are waiting in the queue, many call centers incorporate various activities to entertain callers waiting in a call queue. For example, many call centers play music, news, weather or advertising messages to the caller during the holding period. In this manner, the caller may be entertained or informed of sales promotions for particular products or services. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,444,774 to Friedes discloses an Interactive Queuing System For Call Centers and suggests that music or advertising messages may be played to a caller on hold.
Conventional systems for entertaining callers placed on hold by a call center do permit a caller to select a desired entertainment option. The technology now exists where call centers can provide a caller with a number of valuable entertainment options while the caller is on hold. This technology would enable an increase in caller satisfaction and tolerance of excessive hold times would increase.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,178,240 to Walker et al, provides a system for entertaining a caller placed in a queue of a call center. A method is disclosed that allows the caller to access a plurality of entertainment options while on hold. The entertainment options permit the caller to (i) place a call to a third party while on hold; or (ii) access one or more premium entertainment services while on hold. A PBX/ACD receives the calls destined for the call center, and queues the calls when an appropriate attendant is not available. An IVRU prompts a caller for specific information and forwards the collected information to the PBX/ACD. The IVRU provides the caller with a menu of available entertainment options, which can be accessed, by the caller while the caller is on hold. The PBX/ACD establishes a connection between the caller and the selected entertainment service. The call is then transferred to an available attendant with any data that may be required to process the call.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,400,804 provides an on-hold activity selection apparatus and method that allows an on-hold party to select an on-hold activity, from a menu of on-hold activities, with which to be entertained and/or informed. The on-hold activity selection apparatus detects the occurrence of an on-hold condition in a communication between a first party terminal and a second party terminal. In response to detecting the on-hold condition, the on-hold activity selection apparatus provides a menu of available on-hold activities to the terminal, which is placed on-hold. If a reply is received from the on-hold terminal identifying a selected on-hold activity, the on-hold activity selection apparatus then provides the on-hold terminal with the selected activity. The menu of available on-hold activities may be based on profile information, corresponding to the on-hold terminal, stored in a database. The on-hold activities may include listening to music, advertisements, sports, news, viewing television broadcasts, graphical presentations, prerecorded video messages, reading textual messages, playing video games, browsing the Internet, and the like. The on-hold activities may include live feeds and/or prerecorded activities.
Various other proposals have surfaced in the past for dealing with the on-hold problem. One proposal is for the receiving telephone system to provide the caller with an estimated hold-time until an agent will answer that call. While this information may be helpful where the wait will be relatively short, a caller informed of a long wait might not have the time to remain on the telephone for that long a period, and so may simply hang up in frustration and come away with the feeling of being unimportant to the commercial concern.
Another proposal has been to provide the caller with the opportunity to schedule a return call from the commercial enterprise. Such a proposal is undesirable from a customer service perspective in that it fails to recognize that the timing of the initial call is already based on the convenience of the caller. Any other time is likely not as convenient and thus represents a compromise; an unacceptable compromise in those cases where the timeliness of the call is critical, such as for airline scheduling and the like. Such a scheduled callback approach also raises privacy issues for those callers who prefer not to leave their name and/or phone number merely to request information. At bottom, such systems may suggest to the caller that he should not have called when he did, even though that was the time when the consumer was motivated, and able, to call.
Another system has been proposed in which the calling party has the ability to interrupt the on-hold status of the receiving telephone to alert the nearby agent to return to the phone. Such a remote on-hold termination system is of little value to consumers put on-hold automatically upon receipt of their call, or where no agent is readily available when alerted.
Almost everyone that has used a telephone has been put on hold. In the age of reduced customer service personnel, the “on hold” time can be quite lengthy. During this hold time, the caller is obliged to listen to whatever type of “on hold” music or chatter that has been chosen by the called company, and that choice can be grating or of marginal utility to the caller. There remains a need for a method and system for selecting an audio user interface for telephone hold time and a mechanism for recalling a user's preference, once such an interface has been chosen.